The Drive-By Truckers and their Southern Rock Opera: Part Three (The Duality of the Southern Thing)

           

            Hood's next group of songs is firmly rooted in the historical and very personal south and centers on Hood’s concept of the “duality of the southern thing.” “Birmingham” describes the unemployment and stresses of living there and trying to maintain an authentic identity. “The Southern Thing” is told from the perspective of a proud man who realizes the complexities of the south from General Lee to Martin Luther King, juxtaposing different ideas that play into Hood’s concept of southern duality. Hood has continually written more personal songs about the south and his identification with it throughout his career.

            “The Three Alabama Icons” is set in hell and presents the history of three famous Alabama figures, prefiguring his later look at other historical figures, especially The Dirty South’s two-song exploration of Buford Pusser. The three icons, in question, are George Wallace, Bear Bryant, and Ronnie Van Zant (yet again). Hood provides disclaimers in his song to explain his choices and ward off any objections. Van Zant is from Florida, not Alabama, but he wrote “Sweet Home Alabama,” and the song perfectly illustrates Hood’s concept of southern duality. Here we get more back story about the feud between Van Zant and Neil Young; Hood argues that he wrote it in the tradition of Merle Haggard’s “Okee From Muskogee” to explain his father’s viewpoint of the opposition to Vietnam. Bear Bryant, the second icon, is shortly examined in a tongue-in-cheek manner, as “there’s few things more loved in Alabama than football and the men who know how to win at it.” Parades were thrown for Bryant because he won so often. The narrator got a guitar instead of a football because he hated the sport and wouldn’t play Skynyrd because he needed to rebel against it; the song is one of Hood’s more autobiographical on the record since he often played in bands that didn’t pay much tribute to his southern heritage when he was first starting out. Jason Isbell told Marc Maron that Hood’s father called these bands Chocolate Vomit bands on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. In 2007, his father played on Frank Black’s Fasterman, Raiderman which leaned towards soul.  Patterson Hood later told him that he had played on one of those Chocolate Vomit records because Frank Black had been in the Pixies.

            Hood’s third icon, George Wallace, is the most important and warrants the most attention in the song, and then merits another song to chronicle his further exploits. Wallace was the 45^th governor of Alabama, who served four terms as a democrat during three decades. He ran for president four times during his controversial career, but never broke through nationally. Hood presents the basic details of Wallace's career, tracing his politics throughout his career, from progressive to segregationist and his later attempts at redeeming his segregationist views. Hood uses Wallace as an example in how he has come to understand how many others view the south, as a place where he believes men like Wallace are the rule, not the exception. Hood never realized when he was a kid just how much other parts of the country identified Alabama with Wallace's views. Wallace lost the primary for governor in 1958 to state attorney general John Malcolm Patterson who had the support of the Ku Klux Klan. In order to win the next election, he made a power-hungry grab for votes that stemmed from an extreme policy change, a shift to a hard-line stance on segregation that he used to garner the white vote in the 1962 election. He made it his primary goal to defend segregation by almost any means possible, waging a veritable one-man war on the ideas espoused by the national government in the name of the people of Alabama, even though many didn't really share his views.

            As an example of Hood's conception of the “duality of the southern thing,” George Wallace is exemplary, given that he Wallace complete turnaround later in life and attempted to bury his racist past and even won his last term in office with 90 percent of the black vote. Hood puts Wallace in hell for the next song, “Wallace,” which is sung by Rob Malone, because of his blind ambition and not because of his racism. Working from the surfeit that the devil is a southerner, the song is told from the devil's perspective as he awaits Wallace's arrival in hell. While the song is a rocking number, the song mostly just reiterates the points already made about Wallace's life, and never actually shows what his arrival would look like in hell.

            Cooley's “Zip City” is next and it shows a far different aspect of living in Alabama, one that is far more universal, that of trying to maintain relationships with little or no money. It chronicles a teenage relationship that he had with a girl whose father was a deacon in Zip City, Alabama, an unincorporated community in the Shoals. Patterson Hood said that it is “almost 90 percent true” in a website commentary for the album. The song is also one of the more popular tracks even though it is only tangentially connected to the greater themes of the album, not unlike “72.” Act One ends with one of two Rob Malone tracks, “Moved,” which ends the teenage and pre-fame years of the band. It is semi-autobiographical in the sense that the band, just like the Truckers, has now moved to Georgia. Yet in order to do so, and to find fame, they had to turn their backs on a lot of friends, a concept that will be explored more through their commentary on Betamax Guillotine’s rise to fame in the next Act.

(I originally wrote this essay as part of a failed proposal for the 33 1/3 series that I never completed. I wanted to share it somewhere. Stay tuned for subsequent reworkings of parts of the essay.)